Just as interactions in society are based on a mix of historical experiences and current demands, the artists in the exhibition Society Acts move between perceived experiences and dreamed aspirations. The exhibition’s title – Society Acts – is to be understood as a comprehensive and transparent concept, where acts refers to a visible and invisible movement, social action and to performative gesture. Questions of private and collective identities, political expressions, and personal reflections take shape in the exhibition. The artists question and challenge the public realm, the institutional spaces, and the boundary between fiction and documentary. The exhibition in Riga was a version of Moderna Exhibition 2014 and represented twenty seven artists from Scandinavia and the Baltic sea region.
An extended version of the exhibition Society Acts was first presented last year at Moderna Museet Malmö in the exhibition series The Moderna Exhibition, which historically has been Moderna Museet’s inventory of Swedish contemporary art, taking place every fourth year. Unlike the two previous exhibitions, the selection for Society Acts was widened geographically beyond Sweden, to include artists from a large part of the Baltic region, and also included historical elements, some of which were from the collection of Moderna Museet. The exhibition in Malmö presented 38 artists and artist collectives from seven countries.
Moderna Museet has one of the world’s finest collections of 20th and 21st century art. The photography collection goes back as far as 1840. Moderna Museet is commissioned to collect, preserve, exhibit and organize learning activities relating to all forms of 20th and 21st century art. Moderna Museet Malmö was inaugurated in 2009, as a branch of Moderna Museet in Stockholm.
Society Acts – Version 2. After Moderna Exhibition 2014 (7.03.-19.04.2015, kim? contemporary art centre, Riga) participants: AaBbPp, Cezary Bodzianowski, Eglė Budvytytė & Bart Groenendaal, Zenta Dzividzinska, Johanna Gustafsson Fürst, Joachim Hamou, Laura Kaminskaitė, Essi Kausalainen, Anna Lundh, Henning Lundkvist, Maija Luutonen, Miks Mitrēvics & Kristīne Kursiša, Michala Paludan, Lea Porsager, Emily Roysdon, Imri Sandström, Janek Simon, Ola Ståhl & Terje Östling.
Curator: Andreas Nilsson
Co-curator: Maija Rudovska
Assistant curator: Julia Björnberg
Photographs by Ansis Starks